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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about our common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and in this episode I'm joined by Ellie and Laura to talk about collagen and the meat industry and whether we should be supplementing our diet with collagen pills we started off talking about this in the fake meat episode and then Ellie you came across news articles about deforestation and collagen what's the
link there yes it's quite interesting I've stumbled across this Guardian article and then since I've done a bit more digging and it seems that the margins for the cattle industry especially in Brazil and the Amazon are so tight that what collagen sort of gets claimed as like an organic waste product like byproduct of the cattle industry but because the margins are so tight that's sort of not really a thing so it's like a bit of a misnamed uh phenomenon and actually it's really
contributing to driving sort of uh cattle ranch growth into the Amazon and areas of deforestation uh causing them to expand and even causing conflict with indigenous peoples in the Amazon so yeah there's a lot more to it than it's the eye I think that sounds so lovely so our Obsession I could say or the vanity of collagen could be driving deforestation as well as our demand for meat and lumber and just general living great but let's take a step back and discuss what is collagen Laura
has our resident jack of all trades what do you know about collagen and its chemistry I love the the Dead Pan irony in your voice there like marvelous cute in the industry is doing terrible things to the world as well as other stuff but thanks for the introduction as the Jack of all trades it's fair to say that I chemistry is not necessarily one of my strongest suits um but I've always been fascinated by what our bodies do with the food we eat and to me that all comes
down to chemistry uh so I mean as I say I don't have a strong background in chemistry I don't have an a level in it but I did do some uh in my PhD some simulations of how certain molecules interact and I then worked with loads of chemists who were looking at uh well how radiation affects different chemical reactions so I picked up a lot of Knowledge from them about General chemistry and I think I've also developed a lot of skills that helped me think critically about new stories like
the one Ellie found that sounds quite intriguing so I guess I'll I'll get the ball rolling with some facts about collagen um so it's a protein which means it's a fairly large molecule it's made of amino acids and it's made by specialist cells in our body that um have this really complicated process for actually producing collagen see so on top of everything else our body does we we make our own collagen and so why do we need collagen in our body it's one of the most abundant proteins
in our body I think I think I read that it forms about 30 of the pro total mass of protein in your body um it makes things stiff so it's what gives bones their structure it's what makes skin smooth and bouncy and it also helps form tendons and ligaments and it's I think we said in the meat episode it's actually in muscles as well so it's a really important protein one of many important proteins that I thought there's like multiple types of 28 tight so yeah yeah doing a lot
multivitamins there are actually so many vitamins and minerals that we need but it's about getting the right amount not just getting some yeah and a lot of those vitamins also contribute to how collagen is made so I mentioned there are amino acids I think there are like 20 amino acids and there are they're eight that you can only get from your diet the rest of them your body can make but eight of them you have to consume from other sources um and collagen is made up of three of
those non-essential ones mainly so the ones you can get in your diet and that's what gives it this it gives it this sort of triple helix structure and that's its triple helix structure that makes it quite strong it produces kind of long fibers so the fibers kind of formed together to form bundles and that's what makes your ligaments and that's what gives your skin itch elasticity the other thing with collagen a lot of what I read has said that you produce a lot
of collagen as you're young and then once you get to sort of early 20s moving into your 30s the body produces less collagen which is where all this um like beauty beauty industry comes into it because people want the elasticity In Their Skin if you have less collagen you're more likely to have wrinkles but I mean everyone gets wrinkles as they go older but that's what it comes from is that your body produces less so then the appearances of the Aging are more and thus this is why
people want to take it as a supplement yeah yeah I read a biochemistry textbook about this I have the time about aging it was about collagen synthesis it did mention aging though so so in the skin collagen is made in these special cells called fibroblasts and it sounds like the population of the fibroblasts decreases as you age so you have fewer fibroblasts in your skin and they also become less productive so it doesn't really matter how much collagen you eat or how many
amino acids you eat it's all about those fibroblasts so they're the things that are important here in eating collagen supplements isn't going to produce more fibroblasts there's a big caveat with all these things like the guardian articles they say oh you know people eat collagen supplements to look younger but it's not a cure it's not the elixir of you you still have to you know don't smoke don't drink excessively have a healthy diet do a lot of exercise so yeah I think there's a bit of a
beauty industry spin perhaps on how effective collagen supplements can be there were some trials that looked into this and they did say there seemed to be a benefit but the supplements contain things as well as the collagen which could have an effect right yeah I think there are studies proving that it will make your skin perhaps have more elasticity but I don't know like realistically it's not going to shave 20 years off your appearance anymore so is the idea that some people noticed
that collagen production reduces as you age and they've gone with correlation equals causation and so that's that's what the beauty industry of based this entire idea on I guess so yeah yeah if people have gone from the Viewpoint of well you have less collagen in your skin so just putting it in your body will solve that and that's as far as they sort of looked into it and kind of ignored all the other science that talks about all the processes that are required in these fibroblasts to reduce
the collagen yeah I did actually do a search for canned collagen be moved around the body and I didn't find anything that answered that question so I assume that was a very silly question to ask because the answer is probably no so did you find if we could eat fight riba fibo fibroblasts supplements I didn't look into that because I figured that anything you eat will be broken down right the collagen that you eat is broken down into the amino acids which are absorbed into the body so the same
would be true of these fibroblast cells your body would break it down in its components and then do whatever it wants with it it's not necessarily going to make more fibroblasts though yeah generally we have enzymes to digest proteins and sugars and all that so yeah I can't I can imagine the the stomach or the enzymes in your mouth also just seeing there's that chemical that I can break down well then here I go yum yum yep it's all about the chemistry okay so like these fibroblasts that I
mentioned I keep saying that word it's starting to become meaningless in my head these collagen making factories in our skin they require all these um or they produce all these helper molecules that help make the collagen we have sequences in our DNA that code for all these helper molecules so when we look at thinking about aging we're thinking about how all of these DNA strands are affected as we age so any one of those helper molecules could become defective
somehow as you age and that might be contributing to the decrease in collagen in your skin so kind of as we were saying eating collagen isn't necessarily helpful it's this entire aging process yes like a network isn't it different like it's more than just this use it in a bear was more information in the article that said as well that it's like it's got the power to communicate it's more than just a thing it like sends messages between different muscles or different things so like there's more
going on than just it's a thing you can eat or is a thing that we make that gets used in cells it does have its own way of doing things hmm just thinking like the fibroblasts can say I need to make more collagen and it'll send a messenger chemical out to say bring me amino acids is that what you read or am I just going a bit crazy with the whole Factory chronology so I read that it says um an active role in distributing signals between cells and it helps repair it like gets the
cells that need to repair damages to like tendons or ligaments and it even helps with the immune response as well and apparently you can have collagen-based materials to help control bleeding so it's sort of a an all singing all dancing protein by the sound of it or is it more like a hospital rather than a factory in this neurology yeah well apparently they um gave collagen supplements to people with like knee injuries or like rugby players that you know put a lot of stress on their
joints and their ligaments and it wasn't like a full clinical trial but a lot of the people uh that had this hydrolyzed collagen in this form for injuries did feel a lot better and they could see results like repairs in tendons and that sort of thing so yeah maybe it is more like a hospital yeah so did they do a study parallel to that one where they just fed them a bunch of amino acids and let's see if I had the same effect well this is what I'm saying like it wasn't a
proper like you know control the clinical trial but I put like tendons and stuff it's pretty big news for people you know competing in high level sport I mean it would be great if you if you could encourage recovery and and repair like that but um but yeah like Laura says I am very skeptical who did the study is it people who make collagen supplements and why was there no control of placebo uh what did he say he said we did a placebo-controlled study of our American
football team at UC Davis and the athletes who got hydrolyzed collagen actually showed Improvement markers performance in terms of how quickly they could develop thoughts okay so it's encouraging the use of placebo to see if there was an effect but it still doesn't answer the question about just eating a bunch of a bunch of amino acids yeah is it the same I suppose yeah because right collagen is made up of three I mean of it so if you just ate them would that
have the same effect yes this is what I was wanting so we said each other like 28 different types of collagen and there was three main amino acids but then I think it's made of like 19 amino acids in total so does eating those additional 15 16 does that produce different types of collagen is that important this is where it gets really complicated right yeah I don't even know which type of collagen he's talking about because there's so many and they're all slightly
different so I don't know that's fair enough is this the kind of thing that we are kind of missing is collagen when we talk about it generally is it the whole group of collagens or people talk about specific collagen does do these individual amino acids come separately and do we know which ones are most effective or is it just we have all of them and they're all together working doing the thing because what if they they interact with each other in a particular way that makes them
do the good stuff this is what I didn't get a very thorough answer to and I think it is because there are so many different biochemical processes involved do very slightly different things the way collagen is made it starts off with taking the code from your DNA and a load of amino acids are sort of found used to make this chain of molecules and then all these helper molecules come in that do other things to that chain and then more helper molecules come into you get more things to that chain
they're all modify it slightly by doing things like adding little bits of molecules to some of the amino acids so no one was going to like sit there and explain all the ins and outs of collagen production and all its various ways I don't think I don't think I'll make a really interesting podcast either so I'm going to stop talking collagen is three amino acids two of which are Proline and glycine I don't know what the third one is but I don't know if that's like the main type of
collagen see I read some that said that but then I read like scientific studies that mentioned that they were the main components but the other amino acids were still in there somewhere that modified the structure very slightly but it is a way that was significant like a third of this a third of this and a third of this and then they're like point three is all the other like 15 amino acids to like complete it up to 100 and that's what I figured I can imagine that even though slight changes
make a big difference I must explain whether at least 28 different types of collagen right and they all seem to do different things yeah I would have thought so this is where my non-biological brain as sorry as in I didn't study biology past GCSE that that chemistry gets very complicated once you go into biology that I I just don't understand anymore I'm like why is it not just a simple you know CO2 molecule H2O molecule no we don't even know well we might know the full
chemistry of it but there's no point to it because the only bits we care about are the functional groups or the way the whole thing as a protein interacts as something else because of that whole locking key structure mechanisms and things cool I think we'll we'll park the chemistry there for now is that okay we've confused you enough I think the limits there let's put that aside and maybe zoom out a little and go onto the massive scale of deforestation so the article that kicked
off this episode was the link between the collagen industry well the collagen supplements in beauty industry to deforestation so what's the Lincoln how extensive is it so we were talking before about how you can consume collagen supplements but the collagen that you consume can come from beef fish or pigs so obviously then you need to farm these animals so mainly the beef is where the problem lies because uh as we all know beef is the Big Driver of deforestation in the Amazon in Brazil
and you need space to farm cows you you just do that is the way that it goes and so because collagen has become such a demanded product uh the farmers need more space because they need more cows to keep up with demand so they're then felling much larger section of the Amazon and it's apparently were the collagen industry is now worth four billion roughly but I think the big sort of mismatch is why people didn't realize this before is that collagen has been sold for quite
a long time there's like a waste product you know like all these farmers in Brazil farming cattle for the beef industry and you know as they get killed we're just taking off the collagen because otherwise it'll be thrown away but I think that's actually not the case and actually the collagen craze is driving the idea of having more cows and having more land and the more deforestation as well so I think it's it's a little bit not perhaps so well known uh but yeah it's a bit what's quite
dodgy really for lack of a better way of putting it and there was a big Guardian investigation with lots of other people uh about these cattle branches in Brazil but I think collagen as a animal project is not regulated in the same way that like beef is regulated and it doesn't have all these you know EU laws or all this that and the other about it and there's no pressure on companies to say where they're getting their collagen from or like trying to be sustainable or
you know meeting targets and all that sort of thing so I think it's quite quite fishy the whole thing which I think perhaps is why they did this big investigation because they wanted to to make the links see he said that the meat industry is regulated whereas the collagen industry isn't necessarily but the meat industry specifies how much collagen can go into the meats so they're kind of feeding the problem if you like yeah I mean I I guess so it says here that uh beef soya palm oil
are covered by like due diligence legislation that's coming the EU and the UK designed to like help combat deforestation but collagen is not part of that due diligence legislation so it's kind of even harder to keep track of and it's not perhaps seen in the same way by you know people politicians people making the laws so yeah it's quite it's quite interesting and it's like one of those things where you know you might get a bottle of shampoo and it says all natural ingredients but what does that
really mean is that I think it's a bit like one of those like oh it's a waste product organic waste product but I don't really think it is anymore after reading it sounds like it started off as a waste product and someone think I don't know maybe there was a bit of like oh well someone else wants to use this waste and that's a good thing because we don't like waste whole circular economy sounds like a good idea I think you just found an example of where the circular economy
isn't so good because it drives a more fundamental problem of resource use well I think that's people misusing Circa economy because they should also be not depleting they're just trying to minimize waste in a narrow mindset that they're not seeing the whole pick picture just defending Circle economy out here yeah that's a fair point I like the idea of circular economy but it does sound like they're taking it the wrong way yeah there's this idea as well that if you're raising cattle
catapult meat that's where your profit is coming from but what I think people don't realize is like things like leather and collagen can also make up well it says they're 20 of the income for the farmers so it's it's a big portion of profits so it's not really a byproduct because they will have factored that in what they can make for you know the cows are whole should we say so it is worth it to have more cows and you can make more profit from collagen as well
and then that you know raises demand for more question clearing the forest more deforestation and yeah even conflict with indigenous peoples I read as well by uh digging into it a bit more you mentioned that um 20 of the farmers income or the meat produces income comes from beauty products and it was almost like the article was suggesting that they would raise cows just to sell as collagen but then that seems like a lot of the animal would if it's not being sold for me it
would then go to waste like I feel like there should be attention there or a balance between selling the meat products and selling the collagen products I can't imagine any farmer just not selling meat and raising a cow just for about 20 profit yeah I don't think anyone is doing that to the best of my knowledge I think the meat comes first because that's the majority of the world but they would have factored in I think it's not just meat or collagen it's the fact that the meat and the
collagen are combined as the how much money you can get for that one cow Maybe I'm not entirely sure but that I think that's where it was leading well that's something I found surprising about the meat and poultry industry is is for eggs half half the chickens are gonna be gone so that they can make sure they get eggs and the other half because you know the chickens that we eat and the chickens that lay eggs are not necessarily the same that we you know when you get to
that kind of scale of farming it becomes different and I imagine maybe that's true for like whether there's meat cows that are better than the the leather cows and therefore also better at producing collagen Maybe with the really grisly cows the ones that aren't particularly muscly I don't know I think when you do make different meat products from different age cows I think that is pretty common but I don't know enough about it to know give that you know have lemon cows
specifically or all meat cows then become the leather comes from them as well so yeah I'm not sure to be honest but they do say actually in this article that Catalan moved from Farm to farm like that's quite common during rearing so it says a cow born on deforested land may be found for Slaughter at a clean in inverted comma's finishing Ranch so it's a bit more even more dodgy because you can ship a cow across you know to different farms and in theory they're
supposed to have the capacity to track the cattle but in practice I don't know how uh how well legislated that is so this is like an auditing nightmare yeah you're just trying to trace where the discount come from and find out did it is it linked to deforestation yeah if you imagine the actual practical steps of someone trying to do this or they I don't know how many how many cow how much cattle is raised and how much you can actually try and audit the whole supply chain I also
wonder so going back to my point that our bodies do amazing things to produce stuff our bodies produce collagen cow with bodies produce collagen is there a link between the things that they eat and therefore the land that they live on and the amount of collagen they produce you're talking about they move them around to different land where they have different purposes so it's like a collagen producing land that's really good at providing them with what they need to make collagen and that's where
they go and that somehow involves the land that's been deforested I'm making a lot of leaps there I know is probably more a supply chain thing than uh what the cow eats in a certain area makes good collagen thing but I mean I don't know for sure maybe there is some really tasty excellent collagen producing grass somewhere in Brazil but I I don't think that's quite what they're doing now I don't think it is either I just it sounds like someone has an incredible dislike of the beauty
industry and a bit of a dislike of the meat industry that drives deforestation and they're sort of pressing this point that what you see of celebrities advertising these products isn't showing the reality yeah well talking of celebrities so Jennifer Aniston is a big is she like CFO or something like that for one of these vital proteins which is quite a big wellness company in the states I think and they make collagen products and they are owned by Nestle and Nestle is linked to some of these
factories meat cracking producers in Brazil so it's all like the the supply chains of murky and they've got no obligation to correct the environmental influence of their collagen products so yeah watch out Jen journalists are on to you yeah for legal purposes I have no beef with Jen great pun I see I think there's a bit of an argument for celebrities acting as like you know beacons for what people should aspire to be and you see this a lot with footballers and I think people
like Jennifer Anderson should be held in the same regard she should have done due diligence I can't say that phrase due diligence to figure out if what she's supporting is really meeting un sustainability goals or whatever multi-organizational getting the world traveling in the right direction think people should be paying attention to yeah I think the thing with her is she's like you know obviously Celebrity Status she's got influence if she says collagen makes my skin look young and I feel fat
then people are gonna buy it because of her not necessarily realizing you know the detrimental side of it and the environmental impact exactly and as I've often found in the science communication work that I do facts don't necessarily convince people it doesn't matter how many people you just tell that it doesn't make a difference because it depends on your blastocysts [Laughter] all their Guinness is Jennifer Aniston looking great and she's saying this thing yeah make that a t-shirt foreign
is it could be that eating collagen is somewhat helpful but you know how do supplements differ from us just eating our balance diet I think the conclusion we're coming to is that they don't really you're better off just eating what the NHS recommends that you eat yeah I think you can't smoke don't drink excessively do a reasonable amount of exercise and I think you're probably probably be okay wear sunscreen is probably better for your skin than making collagen supplements yeah I read
a whole thing about um how UV rays they they seem to increase the production of this enzyme that makes the collagen it breaks the collagen down so they go protect the collagen you've got rather than eating more of it exactly yeah in the NHS all their advice is built on an entire massive body of medical knowledge and they stay really up to date with it because I've seen advice on their website change year on year and I've looked at a health thing uh just helping us up again so I look at
it again and the advice has changed a lot of what they were saying was about aging effects the advice that Ellie's just uh summarized there so really the scientific advice for having nicer skin is to prevent Aging in the first place this is our advice yeah minimize the things that help accelerate the Aging maybe we think we should do a future episode on what is aging because we haven't really explained that and it's not going to fit into this episode what I read was
scratching the surface telomeres that's all I know about aging are they the best buddies of fibroblasts I have no idea I wanted to talk about Jennifer Aniston and Nestle and vital proteins and all of that the reason that they were making these links is because the cattle raised on farms that contribute to the despair station were processed in abattoirs that are linked to International collagen Supply chains so they can insert to some extent trace it back so you go to a shop you buy
vital proteins product that collagen that's in the product has come from a cow that was killed in Brazil that potentially was raised on illegally to forested land that was the link I was trying to make before okay this kind of reminds me of the Drax episode about deforestation you know in that Panorama episode the journalist followed a few trees to to get back to did it come from a primary or Ancient Forest so if we you know in in a world where we do have you know loads of drones you
know we have aerial and satellite technology we can almost track that so if we solved that supply chain issue does that make supplements in the beauty industry okay what if we had vegan collagen supplements or should we just settle on the fact that at the end of the day there isn't proven science about collagen supplements it just sounds like fancier Beauty science and there is no absolute evidence to go with this there is some suggestion that you could make you know I'm talking
about fake meat before and making lab grooming in theory you could make lab-grown collagen yeah I saw quite a few research articles about that and it it sounds really feasible and I would have liked to have learned more because the fibroblasts evolved it's really complicated set of reactions so I wondered if they'd simplified it in the lab or if they just take some vibroblasts and got them to do the work but then if we're going into a world where things are more sustainable which
means using maybe fewer natural resources are we going to start making everything in the lab and end up just eating molded protein that they eat in Firefly or it was in The Matrix as well this kind of Goo that everyone ate that had all the essential things that you needed in your diet but was unpleasant looking yeah that is a good point about supplements in general why do we still eat food when we know that largely the macro nutrients and the micronutrients
that we need why don't we just have that in a in a packet more efficient maybe we'd even save energy on like not cooking food and having a massive vat in a factory that produces it this sounds so appetizing doesn't it egg I think you just answered your own question yeah I mean you're the chemical engineer here Antonia so you have dealt with massive Vats of stuff quite often would you have your entire diet grown in a massive fat and that's it in every anything else I
mean personally I really enjoy textures of food and that's something I really struggle with being a flexitarian is a lot of you know those fake Meats lack texture well maybe if the technology got there but like all those days where you you just can't be bothered to her or in this case can't be bothered to slaver on multiple creams and prevent sun damage yeah why not just take the easy way out I mean if I could take a pill that was Sun cream I absolutely would would it be
sort of like a self-generating UV Shield X-Men character now with life glowing skin yeah yeah going into the sort of Nanobots episode that we did a while ago where they sort of come out of your skin and just form this like tiny invisible umbrella over you I think we've got them really off topic now so let's leave it there you know we learned about what is collagen firstly and how it's made up of different amino acids and even collagen itself could be loads of different types and
dubious about how useful it is in skin care but has shown some promise in in repairing injuries um improving recovery times so it could be useful for sports medicine or you know after accidents and that kind of thing but also ultimately do we really know what what are called what where the collagen comes from and is it links to deforestation if it does is it worth it maybe let's just try and prevent the Aging in the first place so if you like this episode I hope you will join us on
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